"Of all land animals, some avoid man, and some of those who approach
him, like the dog, the horse or the elephant, are loving to him because he
feeds them. But on the dolphin, alone among all others, nature has bestowed
this gift which the greatest philosophers long for: disinterested
friendship. It has no need of any man, yet is the friend of all men, and has
often given them great aid."

Plutarch

".....The citizens of Hippo (a Roman colony near Bizerta, in
Tunisia) have a great fondness for fishing, sailing, and swimming,
especially the children.....During a swim towards the open sea....one of
them....goes far away from the shore. Suddenly a dolphin approaches, swims
in front, raises him to its back then shakes him off. Then it dives again
and to the boy's horror, takes him away out to sea. But soon it makes a half
turn and carries him back to his companions on the shore....The story went
around and next day when the children were swimming....the dolphin appeared
again, came up to the boy but he fled with the rest. Then, as if to
call out to them, the dolphin leapt high above the water, then dived back
only to burst forth again from the waves, frisking about and twisting
its body into an S. It played the same game the next day, and the following
days until the young men of Hippo, who had been born and raised by the sea,
became ashamed of their fears. They approached the creature, called to it
and played with it. They stroked the dolphin, who encouraged them.....The
child who had established first contact swam by its side, climbed on its
back, and made it pull him through the water. When he felt that the dolphin
loved him, he loved it in return, and there was no more fear on eithr side;
the child's confidence grew as he became accustomed to the animal....the
remarkable thing is that another dolphin also accompanied them, but only as
a spectator. He neither joined in their games nor accepted any
familiarities; he was content to escort his mate as the boys escorted their
friend...."

Pliney (the younger A.D. 109)

"This happened, not in times gone by, but in our generation. A child
and a dolphin, living in the port of Porosolene, had grown up together,
bound ever more strongly each year in brotherly love. When they reached the
flower of their youth, the boy won first place among all the young men on
land, and the dolphin surpassed all the fish in the sea....The young man
used to launch his boat and row to the middle of the bay. He would call the
animal by the name he had given him in earliest childhood. The dolphin,
hearing the name, would ride the waves, swimming toward the familiar boat,
his tail waving, his hed proudly erect, filled with joy at seeing his
friend, who would stroke him tenderly as he greeted him. It seemed as if the
dolphin wanted to jump into the boat to be closer to the young man. But when
the boy dived into the brine the dolphin swam next to him, side by side, and
cheek by cheek, and their heads touched....The boy often passed his hand
over his friend's neck and climbed upon his damp back, and with happy
understanding, the dolphin took the boy on his back and went wherever the
child's whim directed him.....And he not only carried his friend but also
whomsoever the child brought to him, and obeyed them....for the love of
him."

Oppian 'Halieutica' (about A.D. 200)

"What has ever caught the imagination more than the dolphin? When
man traverses the vast domains his genius has conquered, he finds the
dolphin on all the seas’ surface…Man sees him everywhere – light in
his movements, rapid in his swimming, astonishing in his jumps, delighting
in charming away by his quick and foolish movements, the boredom of
prolonged calms, animating the ocean’s immense solitude, disappearing like
lighting, escaping into the air like a bird, reappearing, fleeing, showing
himself again, playing with the wild waves and braving the tempests. The
dolphin does not fear the elements, nor distance, nor the sea’s
tyrants."

Count de Buffon

Natural History

(published 1749-1804)

"If the role which dolphins played in mythology served to lead the
ancients astray, it also served to help them in the observations they made
of these animals; in this respect they had a factual advantage over us.
Dolphins for modern seamen, are nothing but animals covered with thick
layers of blubber, and sought after for commerce. For the Greeks, they were,
in certain cases, almost sacred beings, and sometimes messengers of the
gods: Apollo took the form of a dolphin. As soon as our fisherman see one ,
they hurry to harpoon him and put him to death. When dolphins were met by
the sailors of old, they were respected as harbingers of good fortune, and
it was almost a sacrilege to kill them . The result of this difference in
the concept of dolphins is that in ancient times, several of these animals
may have become familiar with certain coasts, lingered in certain bays, even
penetrated into ports, where they were received with hospitality and where,
perhaps, they would take up their abode. It is the least that one can
conclude from these recitals if one subtracts from them what is too
obviously the stuff of fables. One can even go as far as believing that
these animals are capable of contracting a degree of familiarity with the
men they see habitually, and that they may become attached to them,
recognize their voice, and obey them."

Frederic Cuvier

"This is life served up as grandly as it ever is, huge and pulsing.
It makes you shed your hard and rational edges, conjure all the
childishness, the insanity, the foolishness, and the mysticism you have
hidden away inside you. The spirit of godly gamesomeness Melville called it,
and you have it bad. And you realize, in the midst of that moment, the silent horror of a
world empty of whales.

Robert McNally

So Remorseless a Havoc

"What need of wings with such an arc of flight, leaping from wave to
wave. To man’s despair inheritors of grace and pure delight. You sew your
seam that binds the sea and air, cruising in happy schools the full stream
flood, guest of the seasons, masters of your world, where all lies open to
your frolic mood, as through the azure depths your bodies hurl.

If only sea-bound man had seen it through, nor at creation struggled up
the beach, to fight forever for the joys that you, Dolphin, find so
naturally in reach. Good pagan comrade, your inherent grace and carefree
ways confound the human race.

Henry Chapin

Dolphin

"Dolphins been ridin’ the Bow up ahead of those human boats for a
long, long time."

Earl Robinson

"I observed a school of dolphins…and something told me that here
was a creature all gaiety, charm and intelligence, that might one day come
out of the boundless deep and show us how a world can be run by creatures
dedicated not to the destruction of their species, but to its
preservation."

James Thurber

"I have watched whales and dolphins for hours on end and I have
watched people watching whales and dolphins, and always this same thing
happens; the animals draw the watcher in. Finally the watcher looks at the
cetacean and it looks back and something passes between them. And in this
curious, unnamed intercourse you begin to wonder. Is there a knowing
intelligence behind that glistening eye?

Robert McNally

So Remorseless a Havoc

Of Dolphins, Whales and Men

"More whales have been destroyed in our time than in any other, and
they have all died stupidly, to serve purposes better met by vegetable oils,
jojoba, and beef cattle. ‘In the world of mammals,’ writes Teizp Ozawa,
‘there are two mountain peaks. One is Mount Homo Sapiens, and the other
Mount Cetacea.’ How odd that the one pinnacle has chosen to lay the other
waste so senselessly."

Robert McNally

So Remorseless a Havoc

Of Dolphins, Whales and Men

"According to the latest and best estimate, tuna fishing in the
years 1959 through 1965 killed 2,600,000 dolphins."

Robert McNally

So Remorseless a Havoc

Of Dolphins, Whales and Men

"Dolphins are the good in us; they know not the bad. They befriend
us willingly from the goodness of their natures, but we are sometimes so
perverse that we betray and kill them. The hunting of dolphins is immoral,
and that man can no more draw nigh the gods as a welcome sacrifice nor touch
their altars with clean hands but pollutes those who share the same roof
with him, whoso willingly devises destruction for dolphins."

Oppia (ancient Greek)

"…It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens,
even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their
functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and
there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who
knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it
with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much
might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal
process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a
fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smell of that anointing. In truth,
a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably
got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to
much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is
used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor
castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil*, no cod-liver oil. What then
can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state,
the sweetest of all the oils?

"That whale….was duly brought to the (ship)’s side, where all
those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly
gone through, even to the baling of the …Case*

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when
the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going
to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it
strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid
part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet
and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a
favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! Such a sweetener! Such a softener! Such a
delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my
fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent
sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft,
gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour ; as
they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like
fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated
aroma,---literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to
you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our
horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm. I washed my hands and my heart
of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsian superstition that sperm
is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath,
I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort
whatsoever…"

*Editor: bailing the case=buckets lowered into the Whale’s head to bail
out the spermaceti oil.)

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

"The whales, which have grown increasingly benign and playful over
the years, are said to look into the eyes of these water-borne tourists as
if imparting some ancient, transcendental wisdom. If all goes according to
plan, a person leaves the lagoon changed, wise in the ways of whales, the
cosmos, and if he or she is lucky, whale sex (it's not uncommon for an
aroused male to turn on its back and display what is euphemistically
referred to as Pink Floyd)."